Academics Steal Data From Air-Gapped Systems Using Screen Brightness Variations

Academics from Israel have detailed and demoed a new method for stealing data from air-gapped computers. From a report: The method relies on making small tweaks to an LCD screen’s brightness settings. The tweaks are imperceptible to the human eye, but can be detected and extracted from video feeds using algorithmical methods. This article describes this innovative new method of stealing data, but readers should be aware from the start that this attack is not something that regular users should worry about, and are highly unlikely to ever encounter it. Named BRIGHTNESS, the attack was designed for air-gapped setups — where computers are kept on a separate network with no internet access. Air-gapped computers are often found in government systems that store top-secret documents or enterprise networks dedicated to storing non-public proprietary information.